To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.
Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
People do not lack strength, they lack will.
Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.
The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.
Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.
Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.
Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
And must I now begin to doubt – who never doubted all these years? My heart is stone, and still it trembles. The world I have known is lost in the shadows. Is he from heaven or from hell? And does he know, that granting me my life today, this man has killed me, even so. – Javert.
God will reward you,′ he said. ‘You must be an angel since you care for flowers.
Ce n’est rien de mourir, C’est affreux de ne pas vivre.
Monsieur’ to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect.
To a gargoyle on the ramparts of Notre Dame as Esmeralda rides off with Gringoire Quasimodo says. “Why was I not made of stone like thee?
Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.
To love or have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other pearl is to be found in the shadowfolds of life. To love is an accomplishment.
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.
Love partakes of the soul itself. it is of the same nature. like it, it is a divine spark, like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable, it is the point of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish.